Making a bowl with _wabi _is considerably more difficult than
making a smooth, symmetrical, perfectly glazed piece. The creation of contrived "accidents," on which much of the illusion of artlessness depends, is particularly difficult. Everywhere there are scars, contaminants, spotty glaze--all as deliberate as the decoration on a Dresden plate; connoisseurship consists in admiring how the artist managed to make it seem so natural and unavoidable.
The same skill goes to make a piece look old, the essential quality of _sabi_. By suggesting long years of use, the bowls acquire humility and richness. There is no need to "wear the new off" in order to give them character; they are already mellow and unpretentious. The potter's genius has gone to create the sense of wear, a quality considerably more difficult to realize than an aura of newness.
The potter wants the Zen connoisseur to understand what he has done: to see the clay, to feel and admire its texture, to appreciate the reasons for the type and color of the glaze. 'The pieces are carefully contrived to draw attention to both their original elements and the process by which these elements were blended. For example, a bowl whose glaze only partially covers its clay provides a link with the natural world from which it came. Its texture springs out, like that of a piece of natural driftwood. At the same time, the bald clay, the streaks of glaze, the hand-formed sculpture, allow one to recognize the materials and the process of formation. When the potter keeps no secrets, one enters into the exhilaration of his moment of creation. Once again, this is a deliberate aesthetic device, reminding one that the potter is an individual artist, not a faceless craftsman. The look and feel of Zen ceramics make them seem forerunners of the modern craft-pottery movement, but few modern potters are blessed with the rich legacy of Zen aesthetic ideals that made these ceramics possible. The secret lies deep in ancient Zen culture, which taught the Momoyama masters how the difficult could be made to seem effortless.
HAIKU IS REGARDED by many as the supreme achievement of Zen culture. The supposedly wordless doctrine of Zen has been accompanied throughout its history by volumes of _koan _riddles, _sutras_, and commentaries, but until Haiku was invented it had never enjoyed its own poetic form, nor might it ever have if the rise of popular Zen culture had not happily coincided with a particularly receptive stage in the evolution of traditional Japanese poetry--an accident seized upon by a great lyric poet of the early Edo period to create an exciting new Zen form. Haiku today is a worldwide cult, with California poets striving to capture in English the spareness and fleeting images that seem so effortless in the Japanese of the early Zen masters.